Windows Vista, Home Premium Edition with Service Pack 1, Upgrade Version (PC)

---

---

Editorial reviews

Product Description
Windows Vista Home Premium is the operating system for homes with advanced computer needs. It will help you use your laptop or desktop PC more effectively as well as enable you to enjoy new, exciting digital entertainment experiences-all with the benefit of added security and reliability. Whatever you choose to do with your home PC, Windows Vista Home Premium will deliver a more complete and satisfying computing experience. Main Features:New user interface - Windows Vista Home Premium has a new user interf...

---

Customer reviews

review by: rjwilmsi date: 2008-11-12 rating:
Not a worthwhile upgrade
A few months ago I bought a new laptop which came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. I've now had the opportunity to compare Vista to my desktop PC's XP installation. In summary Vista doesn't make a compelling upgrade. Memory usage is considerably higher, the default User Account Control setup is so overbearing that I disabled it completely and from the perspective of the end user the new features seem to be mostly related to visual tarting up and transparency effects. These new features add nothing much to productivity. The frequency and volume of critical security patches to apply seems to continue as with XP. There are some useful features but most of these can be added to XP by using existing free applications. Not a worthwhile upgrade.

---

review by: date: 2008-10-26 rating:
A few irritations but more stable than XP SP 3 so worth trying
I have been using XP for more years than I can remember and I recently girded my loins and purchased a laptop with Vista Home Premium and I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised. My lower spec dual core laptop with Vista seems to have better performance than my much higher spec quad core desktop running XP. I would also say that Vista is more robust and I have not yet had a program stop responding, which is a common occurrence with XP. I find Vista's need to confirm your permission to do virtually anything on the machine a bit of a pain but in general , transferring across to using Vista from XP is painless. The only problem I have had is with networking Vista to XP and I still have to resolve this issue.

I purchased my Laptop with Vista installed so I have no experience of the upgrading process from XP so in general I would say if you want to have a Vista experience then purchase the Premium Home edition and try it out on a secondary machine, you may well be pleasantly surprised. A slightly cautious Recommendation.

---

review by: date: 2008-10-19 rating:
Stick with trusty, reliable XP. Vista is a disgrace.
I wrote a review of Vista not long after I started using it. I gave it two stars and suggested that while it's not worth replacing XP with Vista as there are a few annoyances, chiefly the lack of some of XP's best features, Vista isn't too bad. I am not a Microsoft basher, as I think XP is an excellent operating system. I've now realised just how good it was after a few months with Vista. I have wasted more time sorting out problems in Vista in two months than I did during the seven years I had with XP. It is fair to say that I now hate this OS to the point that it turns me into a kind of Basil Fawlty with Tourette's more often than not. My shiny new laptop has the imprint of my fist following a time when Vista just pushed me too far. Therefore I have deleted my original review and replaced it with this new one.

Let's start with Vista's good points. It looks marvellous, with its transparent windows and 3D effects. There is a display pane which gives you an overview of the contents of many file types without you having to open them. The sounds that herald failures or errors are far less annoying than those in XP. The colours are lovely too. And, er... that's it, unless you're the kind of computer user that enjoys spending hours and hours solving OS problems. If so, you'll have a field day here.

I'll start with the minor irritations, in no particular order.

Searching in XP was easy. You typed in the name of a file, specified your search criteria and you always found your file if it existed. Alas, Vista is very different. Search is done by indexing, which means that although the searches are faster your initial search won't find files in all but the most obvious locations. You can index every file on the computer of course, but this takes ages, uses a lot of space and (I am told) slows the computer down. There is an option for searching non-indexed files but you can't do this until you've done the indexed search first. Even then I have found search results to be unreliable. I would bet that people use Search to find system files rather more than they do to find a letter (it's likely to be in Letters, right?). Worse still, Service Pack 1 removed Search from the Start menu, and you have to download third-party programs or do a registry tweak to get it back.

There is no Network Connections folder - one of XP's more useful features was this folder where you could check and modify your internet connections all in one place. You can get it back, but it also involves a registry tweak.

Windows Update in XP installed the majority of the updates while the computer was running. Vista does this on shutdown and startup - which means that if updates have downloaded and you do a restart you can wait over 10 minutes to get your computer running again.

XP had a facility to associate a particular icon with certain file types. Not Vista - you have to download a third-party program to do this.
Screensavers often don't work properly.

In XP you were given useful information when you copied files, for example which particular file was being copied at any particular time. Vista doesn't do this, it just gives you a progress bar and a time estimate which is usually wildly inaccurate. Copying is painfully slow, too.

Say goodbye to Outlook Express - with Vista you get Windows Mail. It is similar to OE and indeed has some improvements, but whereas OE used your spell check from Word, Windows Mail only has a choice of 4 languages and the English option only allows for US English. I get fed up with having to tell it that "realise", "marvellous" and the like are NOT wrong.

Unexpected shutdowns, freezes and the dreaded "not responding" are far more common than they were in XP. At least with XP you could, as a last resort, pull the plug and XP was savvy enough to recover from it. Do this with Vista and more often than not you'll have to wait while Vista repairs itself - admirable in one way, but it created the flipping problem itself!

I've gone on too long already, but please indulge a little further. I would like to describe how Vista ruined my computer today. I tried to copy a large collection of files from one folder to another. Halfway through the OS froze and stopped responding. I managed to restart - same thing. I mirrored this on my XP computer and there was no problem. Third time lucky...not quite. Halfway through the copy Vista froze and all the screen icons disappeared. No way to get Task Manager so I had to pull the plug. Vista then spent hours repairing itself on restart. Eventually I moved the files in small batches. Then I wanted to transfer some of these to DVD and got an error half way through. Another freeze - no way to restart normally so another unwanted switch off with the off button. Since then Vista refuses to start at all - any attempt to do so generates an error or just sits there halfway through startup. Somehow it has corrupted the hard drive and I am now waiting for those nice people at Dell to send me a new one.

There are worse things in life than OS problems, I know that all too well. But if you want to save yourself a lot of hassle, time and stress, stick with XP as long as you can. It sounds like Microsoft have already recognised that this shoddy product is a disgrace and if you're lucky, there will be a better OS (or at least a decent revamped version of Vista) before you are forced to change OS.

Thank you for listening.

---

review by: doctor_fruitbat date: 2008-10-17 rating:
Decent OS; I have no desire to switch
Frankly, I love Vista. While the minimum system requirements are higher than XP, they are by no means unreasonable, and the result is an OS that's easily as fast as Linux or OS X, and one that is much better laid out as well.

Small touches abound. The start menu has been condensed into one box instead of opening a potentially gigantic list of programs, and discrete info and link boxes are peppered throughout, making it infinitely easier to slip from one related task to another. A particularly nice touch is that the address bar showing your folder location includes a drop down arrow for every folder you've had to go through to reach it, with a list of all the folders contained within them, meaning that you can navigate back through into another folder with ease. It is much like the layout of OS X's folders in that respect, yet compresses it into a much more compact and just as functional design.

Functionality is a mixed bag, but usually for good reason; some old programs will find themselves unable to run on Vista's version of their dependencies, but the vast majority of programs can be made to run with compatibility mode. By this point Vista compatible drivers are standard, and shouldn't present a problem at all. Moreover, troubleshooting problems is vastly improved; with wireless problems in particular, XP was notorious for clamming up as to why it was refusing to work, resulting in a protracted search for a solution. At worst Vista is able to angle in on the general area of the problem, and at best will offer a direct fix. It's a hell of a lot better than the previous Windows favourite, 'dump everything and start over'.

Perhaps I'm simply used to the old Windows problems, but Vista hasn't presented any particular problem for me. Viruses have been very rare, crashes infrequent and mysterious errors few and easily solved, usually by Vista itself. The OS hasn't been a barrier to user accessibility as previous Windows versions have been, and the streamlined design works like a dream. And as always, the sheer popularity of Windows means that it comes out top for overall compatibility with the biggest range of file formats, software and hardware, from the most common to the most obscure.

Be warned: User Account Control is the most horrible invention known to man, comprising a 'security feature' that essentially asks you if you want to execute the program you've just clicked on, every single time you open it. You WILL learn to just click through it automatically, rendering it useless, and you WILL hate it. Make sure the first thing you do before anything else is to head into Control Panel and turn it off. Otherwise, I'm happy to say that Vista is an excellent OS, much better than XP and a perfectly acceptable contender to both OS X and Linux. It depends what your want from your machine; nonetheless, it would be a mistake to overlook Vista as being another buggy version of Windows.


review by: date: 2008-10-14 rating:
Don't know what all the moaning is about
First off, I'm not a Microsoft worshipper, but I'm not into bashing them just for the sake if it either.

Initially I listened to the negative comments on Amazon and the net and decided not to upgrade. But when I first encountered it on a laptop at work, I found myself thinking Vista wasn't so bad after all. So in the end I decided to upgrade my home PC and am glad I did and wouldn't consider going back to XP. So let's look at the usual complaints.

You DO need a powerful and compatible PC. If in doubt you can download a utility from Microsoft to check your current hardware. I would recommend this. I suspect that a lot of people are moaning because they didn't check first.

Backwards compatibility is not as bad as they say although it has some surprises in that old software I expected to fail actually works better under Vista (games) and stuff I expected to work has "known Compatibility Issues" (such as, can you believe it, Microsoft's own Visual Studio 2005). There are ways of overcoming these issues, however.

It's at least as reliable as XP. I have not experienced any crashes yet. A recommendation here is to make sure you have the latest drivers for sound and video cards etc.

The User Account Control (UAC) features have narked a lot of people but I don't find them annoying at all. You only tend to get nagged when attempting to do things that are considered a risk. During normal program use you're allowed to just get on with it.

I don't recall the installation taking all day long either as some people have claimed.

There are numerous new things that make using the PC much easier, such as better searching, a links facility in explorer and the open/save dialogs to frequently used folders and many more. Installation of software when running as a restricted user is now better; you get a dialog prompting for an administrator password unlike XP where it just fails.

Of course, it looks real pretty too.

There are some gripes though.

Forget using the built in backup and restore centre. I won't go into why it's crap but do yourself a real favour by buying a third party solution like I did and get something that actually does what a backup program should do. Oh, by the way, the Vista backup utility is incompatible with those you did under XP so you'll have to download a utility from MS that will enable you to retrieve an old backup if you need to.

The locations of certain folders (such as pictures, documents etc.) have changed. This is probably something else that is annoying everyone, but I hardly think it warrants damning the whole OS. Will confuse those less IT savvy than some, however.

So to sum up, Vista is good, but not perfect. Thing is, its detractors can't cling to XP for ever: MS are trying to phase it out so there will come a point in the when a switch will have to be made in order to receive support in the form of service packs and drivers.

Anyway four stars not five, due to minor gripes.

---

Similar products

Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition (3 User Licence) (PC)
Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition for Bundle Offers, 3-User Licence (Service Desk Edition) (PC)
Far Cry 2 (PC)
Kaspersky Internet Security 2009, 3-Desktop, 1 year Subscription (PC)
Spore (Mac/PC DVD)

---

Similar categories

Software . Categories . Home Computing . Operating Systems
Software . Substores
Software . Refinements . Operating System (operating_system_browse-bin) . Microsoft Windows

---